Monday, April 18, 2011

Brain, wit, and large doses of charisma

Four years have been sufficient to multiply your score and manage to be the third most voted for Finland. Brain, large doses of wit and charisma have made it possible for Timo Soini, leader of the far-right Authentic Finnish, having spent 4.05% of the votes in the parliamentary elections of 2007, to 19% in the elections this Sunday.

One in five Finns bet on your prescription Eurosceptic and nationalist. "He draws crowds like flies fly-trap," said a voter intended to vote in the Finnish Social Democrats told Agence France Presse, after listening to a rally of his campaign. "It's a very good speaker. Talk to ordinary people does not complicate things," he told the BBC Jan Sundberg, a professor at the University of Helsinki.

Direct and irreverent rhetoric has given excellent results in this MEP, 48, graduated in Political Science. Married with two children, Soini is a Catholic in a Lutheran country. Catholicism was inherited from his mother. From his student days was captivated by a populist leader who once divided the Agrarian Party, the predecessor of the Center Party and formation factor in the daily life of Finnish policy.

Directs the True Finns since 1997 and for a decade his party was presented to various electoral contests and never exceeded 2% of the vote. Timo Soini, the European Union is the source of all evil and believes it "has failed, we have to manage it better." The Authentic Finnish warned during the campaign that they are not willing to participate in a government that gives the green light for new bailouts, including the Portuguese.

After the first results, Soini said that the bailout of the EU to Portugal will not succeed. "This package (of support) we have now, I do not stay," said the populist leader in the state broadcaster Yle. "We have seen that the package of aid to Greece and Ireland did not work. Now things will start to be otherwise in Europe," he said.

Analysts predict that EU policies are precisely the greatest challenge to the entrance of the far-right party in government, given the pro-European stance of the Conservatives. Another feature of the True Finns is that they are supporters of tough anti-immigration policies. The Liberals represent Soini as xenophobic and accuse his party beat him to immigration.

They say they have infiltrated his candidacy to members of Suomen Sisu, a group that says on its website that "different ethnic groups should not be mixed." Soini has played down the allegations, but admits there are some members of his party "politically incorrect." In Parliament, the True Finns are part of European Liberty and Democracy, a group that includes Eurosceptic parties like the Italian Northern League.